Catching Up

So... lots of stuff's been happening & I haven't been blogging - mostly because I took a holiday from the computer, which frankly, was a really good idea for me. But now I'm back.

We bought a new car - finally! Well, it's not 'new' but 'new-to-us' so now we have a second car - wheee! - at least I won't feel so cooped up on days I'm at home, it'll be easier to motivate myself to the gym if I don't have to walk through snowbanks to get there, and we won't have those strangely-timed days trying to share one car. It has a standard transmission - which I generally prefer - though it's weird getting used to the odometer since it's in miles and I've been converting from kms the whole time I've been here.

Speaking of kms, we had some trouble puzzling out things like 83kms and 59kms chalked on the windows of some of the used cars we looked at until we figured out that it wasn't km for kilometer, but k for 1000 and m for miles! I'm sure Americans wouldn't think twice about it, but I had to puzzle it out the first time I saw it, cause when you write 'km' I don't think 'thousand miles' I think 'kilometers'!

My Dad is doing much better. I know I didn't blog this, but my Dad had a heart attack just before the holidays. He had some severe chest pain, and although his heart didn't stop (it actually stopped during the angioplasty procedure though), when they took him to the hospital to be checked out, tests showed that he had indeed had a heart attack. He came home just after Christmas and although says he feels weak (and doesn't like the restricted diet) he's getting better. It was a lesson is socialist medicine (of which Saskatchewan is one of the most socialist) that he waited about two weeks for the angioplasty, BUT he was kept in hospital the whole time so that if something did go wrong, help would be right there, which is good 'cause they live about forty minutes away from the nearest hospital.

We heard about his heart attack only a few days before we went on vacation, and although his condition was stable and there was no reason to postpone our plans, I did run around getting our visas updated and carried them and passports with us for the trip just in case. As much as I would've loved to see my family, I'm glad I didn't NEED to!

I was warned that driving in Florida might be annoying because Florida drivers are bad, but from what I could see, they still weren't as bad as Bostonians. We did run into some real idiots in the Carolinas though.

I gotta say, I love having teenagers when it comes to road trips. They now have the tolerance to sit in a car for three or four hours at a time without whining (like most adults are capable - note that I said "most") and they only need to blow off minimal amounts of stored up energy at the end of the day. Soooooo different from when they were younger! So the trip itself was pretty good - the only thing that would've made it better was if the two who are old enough to hold licenses had actually gotten off their keesters and gotten them, they could've taken a couple of hours a day and we could've driven less.

Since we were spending money on a vacation this year, we spent very little on gifts, but we did buy a Playstation2 as a family gift. I've never owned a gaming system before, in part because I'm not very good at video games (I never developed the hand-eye coordination when I was a teen because I was forbidden to go to arcades) and then when the kids were younger, I was concerned they'd spend too much time on it. So far, they've been pretty good about limiting their time on it - I think they've developed enough other interests that it won't take over their lives - but we've only bought two games for it, so it might just be that they don't like the two we have. I'm trying to avoid getting sucked into it as well, at least until my exams are done, but that might also depend on what games we get. So far, it seems to have been a good choice.

I read somewhere that the average American gains 7 lbs between Thanksgiving and New Years. I managed to actually lose 1 lb. which is good 'cause I put on some over this last year sitting on my butt doing all this reading. Maybe I avoided gaining weight 'cause I was in the sun & am solar-powered... yeah, I like that idea. If I'm really a solar-powered model, that would mean I would "need" to recharge in the sun every winter. I could go with that - a vacation in a warm place every winter would suit me just fine!